OP CHRISTIANITY UPON OTHER RELIGIOUS SYSTEMS. 



27 



Krishna. The matter is of some importance because we find 

 the same Antichristian argument starting up again and again, 

 in slightly different forms, in reference to many Bible narratives, 

 both in the N'ew Testament and in the Old. The criteria are 

 two. The first is that, other things being equal, the simpler 

 and more unvarnished form of an account is more ancient 

 than the highly elaborated, for " a story never loses in the 

 telling." The second is that, if we have any knowledge of the 

 dates at which the two accounts were composed, the older of 

 the two cannot have been derived from the later. Thus these 

 criteria would prove that the writer of the narratives of the 

 Creation, the Fall, and the Flood, in Genesis, did not borrow 

 his information from Milton's " Paradise Lost." 



Other illustrations are easily given. For instance, in Sanskrit 

 literature there are several accounts of the Deluge which is 

 said to have occurred in Manu's time. One of these is found 

 in the Satapatha Brahmana* and another in the Mahabharata. 

 Now if we compare these two narratives with one another, we 

 perceive that the simpler form of the story is that given in the 

 former : and this is also the earlier in date of composition. The 

 story of Buddha's life and death in the Pali canonical books of 

 the Tipitaka is vastly simpler and less elaborated than that in 

 the much later Sanskrit Lalita Vistara. 



Just in the same way the earliest forms of the tales about 

 King Arthur given in Nennius and in the Lives of the Saints 

 are less poetical and far less romantic than those found in 

 Malory, in the Welsh Red Book of Hergest, in Tennyson's 

 " Idylls of the King," or even in Geoffrey of Monmouth. The 

 recently discovered Sumerian tale of the Flood seems, as far as 

 its fragments have been deciphered, less fanciful and less full of 

 details than the Babylonian story of Sit-Kapishtim which was 

 found in Assurbani-pal's library at Nineveh. Keasonable 

 criticism would apply the same criteria to the solution of certain 

 Old Testament problems. It would thus appear, for instance, 

 that the Hebrew account of the Flood as given in Genesis is 

 more ancient than the Babylonian, and cannot have been derived 

 from it. In the same way, if there is any connexion between the 

 Egyptian " Tale of the Two Brothers "and the history of Joseph 

 in Genesis, the Hebrew narrative cannot have been taken from 

 the Egyptian legend, though the converse process is quite 

 possible. 



* Eighth Adhyaya, 1st Brahmana {Bihliotheca Indica, vol. i, 

 pp. 525 sqq.). 



